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Queer(ing) tailoring: Walter Van Beirendonck and the glorious bas...: Ingenta Connect

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Belgian designer Walter Van Beirendonck is internationally known for his original and critical approach to menswear, using fashion as an arena to discuss social and political issues. This ‘Antwerp Six’ member, however, still seems to be under-represented in fashion studies
scholarship. Therefore, th…

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Welcome to GQ's New Masculinity issue, an exploration of the ways that traditional notions of masculinity are being challenged, overturned, and evolved. Read more about the issue from GQ editor-in-chief Will Welch here and hear Pharrell's take on the matter here.
Thank Alessandro Michele for one of the greatest styling cues of 2019-A$AP Rocky's monarchist silk babushkas. The 47-year-old creative director of Gucci introduced a similar style at his 2017 women's cruise show, held in the chapel of Westminster Abbey, as a straight-up homage to the staid scarves of Queen Elizabeth II herself. Michele is also the source of Ryan Gosling's '50s prom shirt at the 2017 Academy Awards, Donald Glover's groovy velvet suits, and the ongoing Jared Leto-saince that has turned the musician-actor away from off-duty-Angeleno style and into a gentleman of the Canyon, caftans and all.

"The shift in menswear started by Michele is seismic, with that first eerily pretty ensemble predicting a half-decade of luxurious revolt."

The list of men who flock to Michele for suiting, loafers, baubles, and kerchiefs seems endless, in fact, and on it are names as diverse as Swiss tennis star Roger Federer and Harlem designer and hip-hop world legend Dapper Dan. What's more, many of these men are equally as likely to sport a Gucci dress as they are a Gucci loafer. At the 2019 Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute Gala, Leto showed up wearing a Michele-designed red evening gown and carrying a model of his own head as an accessory. Michele's version of masculinity has become fashion's predominant one: an idea not just of men in skirts but of men embracing loveliness, textural richness, and glamour-things that in the 20th century were reserved largely for women. Gucci's celebrity friends and collaborators are helping to popularize this aesthetic in the mainstream and, as a result, allowing the designer to push himself further and further in restyling the modern man.

Michele lets out a big, bright laugh at the recollection of Leto's Met-gala look. He has just returned from summer holiday and is gazing down past his chestnut locks into the FaceTime screen, tapping his bulky rings on the table in Gucci's Rome design offices for effect. "Jared is a person who loves to experiment," Michele says. "When I saw him with the evening dress, I thought that it was so unbelievably beautiful. At the end of two days of big conversations-on the phone, in his room, during a dinner-I said, 'Choose the red dress with the head. You will be like a Shakespearean character.' "

"The era of being masculine only if you have a specific suit-it's over. Also, women need men who are more connected with a woman's world."

The Bard is an apt reference for a designer who stages his runways more like theatrical events than typical catwalk fodder. It's a precedent set by his debut collection, for fall 2015. At that time, Michele was acting as an interim creative director, given just five days to make something to present on the brand's Milan runway after the unceremonious departure of Gucci's then creative team. What he dreamed up was nothing short of revelatory. The flaxen-haired model Hugo Goldhoorn opened the show in a red silk pussy-bow blouse and pooling lank trousers. Bracelet-sleeved suits in deep emerald, Young Turk velvet-trimmed coats, and a new iteration of Gucci's banker-bro loafers, stripped of their backs and lined with Einsteinian tufts of kangaroo fur, followed. Less than five days later, Michele (and that pussy-bow blouse) was officially appointed the creative director of Gucci. Five years later, the shift in menswear started by Michele is seismic, with that first eerily pretty ensemble predicting a half-decade of luxurious revolt.

Michele designs both the menswear and womenswear collections simultaneously, pulling ideas from one to the other. "It's more interesting, sometimes, to work on the menswear. You can really shout, because menswear is more rigid," he says. "When you try to manipulate the codes of a man's wardrobe, you can do something really new. It's pretty interesting. I started thinking about an idea of beauty that, for me, it doesn't belong to men or women. It's almost the same; that's why I put a few men's looks on women and the reverse. You can be more masculine showing your femininity."

In the five years since the fateful show that ordained Michele as one of fashion's utmost provocateurs, he has staged an overthrow of power in the world of menswear by fashioning new male identities. Michele's conquest occurs with a stitch in place of a sword. That stitch can hold a hem flared out, so when Donald Glover slinks across a stage, he does so with a glamazon kick. It can hold the shoulder of a jacket tight and high, to relay a schoolboyish charm, or it can secure a button on a silk blouse-even if it looks best undone. All together, these are luxuriously made garments that allow guys to liberate themselves from antiquated codes. No longer must you choose between powerful and cool. Michele's work allows for the conveyance of a full range of characteristics: sensual, coy, intellectual, menacing. It's a sharp pivot from Gucci's last heyday, in the '90s, when Tom Ford popularized hot-bod hedonism with bare chests and tight trousers.

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How This Man Kick-Started Fashion's Genderless Revolution

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Welcome to GQ's New Masculinity issue, an exploration of the ways that traditional notions of masculinity are being challenged, overturned, and evolved. Read more about the issue from GQ editor-in-chief Will Welch here and hear Pharrell's take on the matter here. Thank Alessandro Michele for one of the greatest styling cues of 2019-A$AP Rocky's monarchist silk babushkas.

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Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear is the first major V&A exhibition to celebrate the power, artistry and diversity of masculine attire and appearance. Contemporary looks by legendary designers and rising stars will be displayed alongside historical treasures from the V&A's collections and landmark loans: classical sculptures, Renaissance paintings, iconic photographs, and powerful film and performance.

The exhibition showcases the variety of possible masculinities across the centuries from the Renaissance to the global contemporary: from looks by Gucci, Harris Reed,Grace Wales Bonner and Raf Simons,to paintings by Sofonisba Anguissola and Joshua Reynolds, contemporary artworks by David Hockney and Omar Victor Diop, to an extract from an all-male dance performance by Matthew Bourne's New Adventures.

The exhibition presents around 100 looks alongside 100 artworks, displayed thematically across three galleries, Undressed, Overdressed, and Redressed.

Undressed explores the male body and underwear, looking at how classical European ideals of masculinity have been perpetuated and challenged over the centuries. Plaster casts of the Apollo Belvedere and the Farnese Hermes - which highlight a tradition of depicting idealised male bodies draped in textiles that reveal more than they conceal - will be juxtaposed with fashion by Jean-Paul Gaultier and A-COLD-WALL*, and prints and photography by Lionel Wendt, Zanele Muholi and Isaac Julien.

The second gallery, Overdressed, explores the elite masculine wardrobe, epitomised by oversized silhouettes, lavish materials like silks and velvet in daring colours, and symbolic patterns to express status, wealth and individuality. On display will be armoured breastplates, silky smoking suits, makeup and shaving equipment, sweeping capes, ribbons and lace, including Grinling Gibbons' wooden carving imitating a Venetian needlepoint lace cravat. Through the lens of contemporary fashion designers including Rahemur Rahman and Kim Jones, Overdressed will show how historic ideas begin to shift, with a full rainbow of masculine outfits on display.

The third gallery, Redressed, opens with a reflection on English country tailoring and the origins of the suit - with historic garments from the V&A collection shown alongside contemporary reimaginings, including a kilt by Nicholas Daley - before exploring how military attire influenced civilian dress.

Redressed will also include paintings as well as extensive photography showing changing styles and attitudes, from Oscar Wilde, Claude Cahun and Cecil Beaton to The Beatles and Sam Smith. Robert Longo's 1981 drawing from the series Men in the Cities will introduce the final part of the section about the dissolving of the suit, and how a new wave of fashion designers from Rick Owens to JW Anderson to Comme des Garçons to Lesiba Mabitsela are slashing away at conventions, both for menswear, and masculinity.

Outfits worn by familiar faces will be interspersed throughout, from Harry Styles and Billy Porter to David Bowie and Marlene Dietrich. Innovative creations and diverse representations will highlight and celebrate the multiplicities of masculine sartorial self-expression, dressing beyond the binary.

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About the Fashioning Masculinities exhibition · V&A

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Find out about the first major V&A exhibition to celebrate the art of menswear

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Dress Codes

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Suits That Move

Designers like Brooks Brothers and Zegna are bending the rules of men's suits. To illustrate the new freedom, two dancers from the New York City Ballet test the limits of the wardrobe staple.

No script.

Designers like Brooks Brothers and Zegna are bending the rules of men's suits. To illustrate the new freedom, two dancers from the New York City Ballet test the limits of the wardrobe staple. Credit Credit... Bon Duke for The New York Times

In the beginning, there were the rules, handed down from the proverbial mount. Thy suit shall be thy prison, in sturdy black, navy blue or gray. Thy feet must ache in polished brogues. Thy weekend wardrobe alone should be a comfort.

But in the midst of a veritable boom in men's wear, a funny thing is happening: The rules (even the suits) are loosening up.

"The men's wardrobe has evolved immensely," said Tomas Maier, the German-born designer of Bottega Veneta, the Milan-based luxury label, and of his own more-casual namesake line. "There's a lot of men out there who do not need those sartorial codes. They're not lawyers, they're not working on Wall Street. Including myself."

In recent decades, following the avant-garde Armani billow of the 1980s, suits had mostly settled into a comfortable rut: stiff, dark, breaking just so over the loafers, so uniform as to be barely noticeable.

The historian Anne Hollander opened her 1994 study, "Sex and Suits," with an admission: "Like other excellent and simple things we cannot do without," she wrote, suits had lately acquired "an irritating perfection. "

That becalmed moment ended with the advent of Thom Browne, who, with a rebel streak and a tailor named Rocco Ciccarelli, disrupted men's wear, with suits whose hemlines took up residence north of the anklebone, trousers that hewed like sausage casings to the legs and jackets shrunk to squeeze. His fellow designers quickly followed suit.

The trim suit has not left the building; a quick visit to most stores will make that clear. Nor has the classic suit: dad, trad and undangerous to know.

But those have been joined, once again, by a roomier option, a suit that moves.

The new freedom in men's wear is to have both suits and not suits, and suits that live in a nebulous territory between: two-button options made in sport fabrics, or previously undreamt-of colors, or, or, or ...

Even for a young generation less accustomed than its forebears to wearing suits, they retain a kind of numinous allure. "We have three galas a year," said the New York City Ballet dancer Joshua Thew, 27, when asked how often he wears a suit, "so maybe three times a year?"

Along with his colleague Zachary Catazaro, Mr. Thew donned a few of the freest-wheeling suits for the accompanying fashion shoot. "I love wearing suits," Mr. Thew said. "I wish I could wear a suit more."

"There's a major shift in the attention on men's wear," said Tom Kalenderian, the executive vice president for men's wear at Barneys New York and a 35-year veteran of the industry. "It's coming from men directly. It's almost become a fetish."

And, he said: "You never see writers falling back on terminology like 'metrosexual.' Five years ago we were trying to apologize for why guys were buying a bag."

The numbers tell the story. According to a recent report by the global consulting firm Bain & Company, the men's ready-to-wear market, which generated about $28 billion in 2014, has been outpacing the women's, with a compound annual growth rate of 5 percent since 2010.

A pair of case studies stands in Manhattan. Two temples of men's wear, Barneys and Goodman's, Bergdorf Goodman's men's store, have undergone recent renovations. At both, the number of men's brands has increased, as well as the diversity - and levity - in the selection of each.

"It used to be you would walk into a men's shoe department, Bergdorf Goodman included, and it was a sea of brown and black cap-toes and lace-ups," said Joshua Schulman, Bergdorf's president. "Today there is as much variety and innovation in men's shoes as there is in women's shoes."

"It's a much more open playing ground," said Mr. Maier, the designer. "It's more interesting to make the clothes."

He speaks as a survivor of a sterner era. "You couldn't wear an open Birkenstock in Paris when I moved there in the mid-'70s," he said. "It was impossible. People would stop you in the street and insult you."

Now, Mr. Kalenderian said, "There's only one rule: You have to look great."

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A New Freedom in Men's Suits (Published 2015)

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Dress Codes In the beginning, there were the rules, handed down from the proverbial mount. Thy suit shall be thy prison, in sturdy black, navy blue or gray. Thy feet must ache in polished brogues. Thy weekend wardrobe alone should be a comfort.

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A creative fluidity has blossomed in men's fashion in recent years, propelling us into the midst of a menswear renaissance, and refashioning stale historic notions of what it means to be masculine or feminine. Throughout history, who wears what has created controversy and strong opinion, and in particular, masculinity has been shaped and restricted by gendered expectations of fashion: skirts and dresses are girly, suits are for men; heels are for women and athletic gear is more masculine.

These confined, toxic notions of masculinity demand that men fit into a specific box and suggest that for a man to dress in anything less than the 'fully masculine' would be akin to stripping him of his manhood: he would become soft, feminine, gay, or fragile. These terms are used especially among men themselves about those who do not conform to masculine stereotypes. But these terms should not denote anything bad: neither 'feminine,' 'gay,' 'soft,' nor 'fragile' should ever be used as an insult.

"The 'manly men' are those who have the courage and strength to dress in whatever they prefer"

Significantly, fashion itself has traditionally been a gendered activity, associated with women and gay men, reduced to something that is frivolous and meaningless by wider patriarchal norms. Dressing up, wearing makeup, and taking an interest in clothes has largely been dismissed by the world of straight men, and yet fashion and masculinity have been intertwined for centuries. Masculine ideals of power, strength and dominance are often demonstrated through male clothing, with height and athletic stature being emphasised by modern menswear. Even as newborns, baby boys are fashioned into their masculinity through the colour blue, showing that masculinity and fashion are inherently linked by our society's fixation on gender.

Nevertheless, the gender divide in fashion was not always so rigid. In Ancient Greece, men would wear chitons which were far less shaped than our clothing is today. Meanwhile, trousers were worn by foreign horse riders, and by Amazon women in vase paintings, leading the Greeks to denounce trousers as 'barbarian', an opinion which the Romans subsequently upheld. Even in Renaissance times, the clothes of both men and women were generally described as draped garments or tunics. The elite masculine wardrobe developed over time to include oversized silhouettes, bold colours and luxurious fabrics, including silk and velvet.

"Today he proudly wears nail polish, sparkly suits, tutus, tiaras and dresses, happily explaining that he values being in touch with his femininity. This does not make Styles any less of a man"

This lavish masculine style is intensely different from 19th century styles, in which clothing became far more gendered. Trousers began to be worn, and men wearing skirts vanished. The 'gentleman' was created, and the suit evolved into the epitome of masculine fashion, becoming equivalent to male power, professionalism, and virility. In the modern workplace, menswear almost always revolves around the suit, usually plain, dark coloured, and completed by the tie, another not-so-subtle symbol of manhood.

Today, however, the possibilities of menswear are finally shifting away from this restrictive gendered divide, and the barriers created by toxic masculinity are beginning to break down. Harry Styles uses fashion to challenge the stereotypes of what it means to be a man. During his One Direction era, the media sold a false perception of Styles as an ultra-male womaniser, adopting a sexist image of traditional masculinity which Styles has since been able to change through his clothing. Today he proudly wears nail polish, sparkly suits, tutus, tiaras and dresses, happily explaining that he values being in touch with his femininity. This does not make Styles any less of a man.

Styles was the first man to appear solo on the cover of and he did so wearing a dress in December 2020. While his cover was admired by many, it also caused controversy. Conservative author Candace Owens responded in a tweet that "There is no society that can survive without strong men... Bring back manly men." Styles cleverly turned her words on their head, directly quoting them when he posted another photo of himself, posing for his Variety cover shoot in a baby blue pleated suit, complete with white ruffles and a V-neck cut. His post directly calls out the toxic masculinity that runs deep in our culture, showing that 'manly' can mean whatever a man wants: whether in a dress or not, he is still just as much of a man.

Designer Harris Reed, whose designs are a favourite of Harry Styles, also embraces gender fluid clothing. Reed's pink ensemble, which is set to feature in the V&A's upcoming exhibition on menswear, recalls the fashion of Joshua Reynolds' 18th century portraits: oversized sleeves, bows, ruffles and a pink silk texture all prove that lavishness and luxury are returning to menswear. It seems that at last, modern men are being permitted to flaunt their interest in fashion.

While Western society has come to tolerate women in trousers, it is still blatantly offended by a man in a skirt. This is largely down to the toxic masculinity which pushes men away from their feminine side, and leads them to name-call their friends for liking pink, and to uphold misogynistic ideas of femininity as weaker and female interests as frivolous. At last, however, these barriers are being broken down: changing concepts of men's fashion mean that the V&A will hold the first major exhibition to explore menswear next year. Cultural shifts mean that being manly no longer has a toxic dress code. Even Daniel Craig attended the most recent James Bond premiere in a pink velvet suit: that a man who plays a character so associated with the traditional masculine uniform could stun the red carpet in a vision of pink shows just how much the notion of 'manliness' has changed. Being a man today can mean whatever one wants it to mean - and, as Harry Styles has proved, the 'manly men' are those who have the courage and strength to dress in whatever they prefer.

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Columnist Eleanor Antoniou celebrates the transfiguration of menswear from something toxically prescriptive to something altogether more inclusive

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Some fashion trends sneak up on you. Others ring out loud and clear. Last week, as the Spring '14 menswear shows kicked off in London, one trend sounded with all the subtlety of an air horn: androgyny is the new black.

The most forceful expression of this theme came from up-and-coming brand JW Anderson. The five-year-old label comprises collections for men and women, and designer Jonathan Anderson likes to overlap the look of the two. Last season, for instance, Anderson showed pairs of ruffled shorts for men much like the ones in his Spring '13 womenswear collection. And this time, Anderson's dominant silhouette was a lean tunic paired with fluid, elongated trousers, another shape he'd begun to articulate in his previous womenswear show. But the look that got eyebrows arching and tongues wagging was Anderson's male halter top: backless, semi-sheer and floral patterned, the look was unavoidably effeminate. "Atrocious," sneered The Daily Mail.

Anderson is upfront about the fact that he likes testing the boundaries between men's and women's clothes. But he insists that he's not setting out to create controversy; for him, the gender-bending emerges organically, out of formal risk-taking.

"In a way, it's funny that people had such a strong reaction to that look," Anderson tells me. "I mean, that top started as a long raglan mac. And then we cut the sleeves off, and then we made it short. When you're in the studio," he goes on, "that kind of experimentation feels normal. In fact, it's the point. You're playing with a piece of fabric, trying to create a new line, a new proportion. But then you present that to the world, on a runway, and it becomes this 'thing.'"
A pattern forming
If Jonathan Anderson were an outlier, one mad designer whipping up androgynous looks out of a surfeit of aesthetic zeal, that would be interesting. But what's more interesting is the fact that Anderson is not alone. Another London up-and-comer, Shaun Sampson, showed pale pink organza board shorts and 'skirts' made to look like beach towels. At Alexander McQueen, creative director Sarah Burton opened the show with a fitted suit of white lace. The Topman show featured fanciful cowboys, and embroidered florals. At a certain point, it started to feel unfair, or arbitrary, to think of those looks as 'feminine'. I found myself wondering: who decided that men couldn't wear lace? Or skirts, for that matter? Back in ancient Greece, guys were wearing togas, right? So when did all this vigilance around masculinity happen, exactly?

"I feel like we've been in a really conservative moment," notes Martine Rose, another London-based menswear designer who tests gender conventions with her clothes. "It's so lazy, this way of thinking - that 'real' men wear this, but not that. I was really influenced by [funk musician] Rick James, for this collection," she continues, "and he was so sexy, so gangster, and wearing ruffled shirts and thigh-high red boots. He wasn't letting his clothes define his sexuality. Or his masculinity."

Rose's new collection featured all manner of 'feminine' detail. What made it intriguing, though, was the fact that the attitude of the clothes was so incontrovertibly masculine. Rose draws a great deal of inspiration from sport, and beyond that, from the way even non-sporty guys wind up integrating athletic kit into their wardrobes. This season, she expanded that concept into lace-frilled running shorts and blouson trousers with the indolent slouch of tracksuit bottoms.
'Crisis of confidence'?
"Footballers back in the seventies, they used to wear those little shorts," Rose muses. "No one was questioning their manliness; other guys wanted to look like them, in fact. And they were sexy, those footballers. They had the confidence to show their bodies, and to be playful."

Confidence. If there's one thing these new androgynous looks demand of men, it's that. Which raises the question: have the über-masculine looks dominating menswear up to now been signaling a crisis of male confidence?

When The Atlantic magazine publishes cover stories that trumpet ' The End of Men', it's tempting to read the advent of Don Draper, style icon, as channeling nostalgia for an era when men were the breadwinners. Likewise, the rise of earthy looks - lumberjack hipsters, and all that - could be symptomatic of revanchist idolatry of the 'manly' man, who would never, ever change a diaper.

But you could just as easily argue that Mad Men fetishists in the US are really just sentimental for the days when America was coming up in the world. And all those guys in their Woolrich parkas and plaid flannel, well, maybe their dreams are of working with the hard, physical matter of the world, rather than the e-stuff and iThings of our virtual age.
Fine and dandy
The point is, clothes can be complicated. They can tell a few stories, all at once. And so it's entirely probable that there's more to this gender-blurring fashion moment than gender.

Dandyism, wrote the 19th Century poet and essayist Charles Baudelaire, emerges in times of transition. And at such moments, he asserted, "a certain number of men, disenchanted and leisured 'outsiders'...may conceive the idea of establishing a new kind of aristocracy."

What Baudelaire is talking about, of course, is taste. And when Jonathan Anderson explains that his controversial halter tops were the product of his desire to create "a new line," he's talking about taste, too. So is Charlie Casely-Hayford, co-founder of the luxury menswear brand Casely-Hayford, when he says that feminine elements give his brand's natty suits a sense of "refinement." You could argue that what we're seeing on menswear runways right now is the establishment of Baudelaire's aristocracy of taste. The folks in the front row were perfectly blasé about the halter tops at JW Anderson's show. Their focus was on the way Anderson finessed the look, and his conviction in selling it

There's a kind of ivory tower thinking at work in this, no doubt about it. But I'm willing to bet that, given some time, the public will come around to some version of this new unisex aesthetic. It's happened before: as Martine Rose pointed out, there was a fey moment back in the seventies. And the feminine influence is already apparent in a handful of brands, like Casely-Hayford, that traffic in relatively conventional men's clothes.

And Charlie Casely-Hayford agrees that, in time, his customer will fully come round. "We want to challenge our customer, but we don't want to freak him out," he says. "So every season, I'm asking myself - can we do a skirt? Will he understand? We're almost there," he adds. "But, you know, not quite yet."

If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

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Are 'feminine' looks the future of men's fashion?

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Some fashion trends sneak up on you. Others ring out loud and clear. Last week, as the Spring '14 menswear shows kicked off in London, one trend sounded with all the subtlety of an air horn: androgyny is the new black. The most forceful expression of this theme came from up-and-coming brand JW Anderson.

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Laura Morley Staff Writer

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The word "androgyny" is used to describe the removal of male or female characteristics in order to create a person devoid of distinctive sexual attributes.

Fashion has experimented time and time again with the idea of the genderless person- but is it the lack of a defined gender that enthrals us? Or is it the possibility that the person could be either? Andrej Pejic, an Australian male model, was initially scouted after he was mistaken for a female, and following the discovery of his true gender, shot to fame on the strenght his long blonde hair and delicate, feminine looks. Agyness Deyn, on the other hand, represents androgyny in female models, using her boyish looks and charm to land hugely important fashion contracts with the likes of Burberry and Giorgio Armani. But androgyny isn't a modern trend, but instead something which has accumulated throughout the decades, and gradually become what it is today.

The 1920s was a period of true liberation for the western woman. She began to experiment with makeup, and she drove a car. A long-stem cigarette dangling from her acrimonious pout seemed to be a permanent fixture, and you never knew whose bed you'd find her in. She consumed far too many cocktails and listened to jazz on repeat. She was brash, she was bold and most of all, she rebelled against everything she had been taught, rejecting the social norms which had been so carefully set in place by the generations gone before her. When a new transatlantic culture descended at the end of the first World War, it was the 'flapper' who emerged. An entirely new genre of youth, this young woman was a result of the social and political turbulence that she had lived through. Now an independent individual, she refused to endure the male-dominated society of her female ancestors. The fashion statements of a flapper almost stood to emulate that of her male counterparts. Gone were the days of boned corsets, as the flapper often used long strips of cloth to minimise the appearance of her breasts. Bobbed hairstyles were adopted and hemlines suddenly rose to just below the knee, often giving way to a peep of silk stocking. Though these women embraced androgyny, they did so to prove to men that they were capable of functioning as equally valuable and important citizens: holding down jobs, voting and making decisions for themselves. The flappers was the pioneer of the progressively blurring lines between masculinity and femininity, though in paradox, she could flaunt her sexuality and exercise new sexual power, the likes of which she had never experienced before.

Popular culture truly returned to androgyny in the 1970s, with the rise in popularity of celebrities like Boy George, Prince and spandex-wearing, mullet-sporting, coked-up David Bowie. The release of sexually explorative films like Rocky Horror Picture Show which starred an ambiguously styled Tim Currie playing "sweet transvestite" Dr. Frank-N-Furter, fully defined the 1970s as a decade of sexual flamboyance and exploration. The simultaneous British glam-rock explosion uncovered the connection that working class youths felt with these "gender-benders", as unclear sexual identities suddenly became far more rebellious than drug use or violence. As far as high fashion was concerned, influential designer Yves Saint Laurent became hugely involved in furthering popularity of the androgynous look, encouraging minimalist, masculine styles for women. Having created 'Le Smoking', the first tuxedo-style suit for women, in 1966, YSL provided women with revolutionary fashion choices, giving them the option of wearing whatever they pleased for the first time in history.

Androgynous fashion is something which is well integrated into the society we know today, with menswear-turned-womenswear items like blazers and oxfords becoming commonplace. Androgyny is eclectic and intriguing. It takes what we expect from fashion, and turns it upside down, and has earned it's status as something which never goes out of style. Androgynous fashion once again had a dominating presence on the catwalks at February's London Fashion Week 2012, proving to be the centre-point of the collections of several renowned designers, including Paul Smith. In the twenty-first century, it seems that sexual boundaries barely exist, and houses like McQueen, Gaultier and Givenchy, to name just a few, have ensured that androgyny is no longer taboo, but a fact of life.

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Laura Morley Staff Writer ADVERTISEMENT The word "androgyny" is used to describe the removal of male or female characteristics in order to create a person devoid of distinctive sexual attributes. Fashion has experimented time and time again with the idea of the genderless person- but is it the lack of a defined gender that enthrals us?

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I grew up in the ’80s when men wore makeup and their hair long. It wasn’t uncommon to see earrings in most young men’s earlobes. The 21st century has brought new feminine trends to men’s fashion.

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ROBERT LACY, SUIT YOURSELF, The Sewanee Review, Vol. 122, No. 4 (Fall 2014), pp. 592-596

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This is a work in progress 'Progress Map' and serves as a template for future time management.